Varnöfladen

It's mid-morning on Sunday, July 12. We are still anchored in the middle of Varnöfladen, having enjoyed a relaxing day here all day yesterday. Peter worked on splicing and repairing lines and on other tasks. For breakfast, I made bread pudding with the sweet bilberries we picked and stale bread, enough to last the two of us a couple days. I also created an colorful and attractive salad for lunch and a couscous with fried vegetables for dinner. We only have a couple more days before we fly to the U.S., so my challenge is to use all the fresh food in the refrigerator and all the fruit, most of which we bought a few days ago in Söderköping.

Fat dragonfly on my shoulder on Friday evening

I also spent some time dangling my feet in the warm water while sitting on the swim platform, fascinated by the slim blue and black dragonflies that darted and danced all around me and sometimes landed on my skin. It was a lovely place for reading a book; it was true vacation mode.

Two dragonflies on my leg

Dragonflies exploring my feet

We blew up the stand-up paddle board later in the day and Peter, like a gondolier, paddled me around this bay. We stopped to say hi to a boat moored Scandinavian style on the shore and invited the man and his two teenage children over to see our boat and talk about the archipelago after dinner. They arrived about 8:30 p.m. First, we showed them around the boat; the man and his 17-year-old son were fascinated by her size, electronics and engine room. Then we looked at some of the charts he had brought over. The archipelago is well-charted and literally offers endless opportunities for exploring, with over 24,000 islands or skerries, few of them inhabited. 

Mantra from the paddle board

There was no breeze yesterday evening which meant that the mosquitoes were everywhere. After our new friends left, we closed ourselves in and spent the next 45 minutes getting ready to go to bed and killing dozens of mosquitoes. Our level of success was so great that we were not annoyed by them at all when our heads sunk into our pillows around 11:30. Once again, it was a late bedtime, which meant that we slept in until around 9 a.m., although Peter woke up around 6 and was reviewing stocks on his phone in bed before succumbing to sleep with the gentle rocking of the boat, like being in a cradle. 

We are off to another anchorage now and will get to our berth in a couple days, where we will leave Mantra for four weeks. We are sad that our schedules did not match up and that we missed seeing Aunt Helen from Cape Town a couple days ago.